Our Company

How Mint Started

Back in 2005, while using Quicken to catch up on his personal budgeting, Aaron Patzer realized that he was in for an afternoon of tedious accounting-type work: poring over his statements, filling in gaps in entries, and categorizing dozens of purchases. All this effort just to get to the answer to one, seemingly simple question: How much did I spend this month? And on what?

After a couple of hours, when Aaron couldn’t get that answer (and he holds Masters degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Princeton and Duke) he started to wonder if there wasn’t a better way. So instead of finishing his Quicken update that day, he began thinking about building what would become Mint.com.

Breakthrough Technology

Aaron’s personal experience led him to create two breakthrough technologies which make Mint so useful, intuitive and unique:

• A patent–pending categorization technology that automatically identifies and organizes a user’s: purchases made in virtually any bank or credit card account; transactions in virtually any investment, brokerage or retirement account.
• A proprietary search algorithm that finds savings opportunities unique to each user.

Mint’s technology does everything automatically in a way that other online banking applications and personal finance management software don’t. It provides useful information and smart, specific recommendations for saving or making more money based on each user’s individual purchase history.

Market Leadership

After nearly two years of development, the public beta of Mint.com was launched on September, 2007. Because the product solved the long–standing problem of easy and free personal financial and budget management in a radically new way, Mint.com quickly attracted more users than any other online solution. Over half a million people opened Mint.com accounts in the service’s first year – making Mint.com the leading and fastest growing service of its kind.

Mint.com has also caught the attention of major national media, winning top industry honors from Money, PC and PCWorld magazines, and being named one of the Top 50 Websites by Time magazine.

Continuous Innovation

Mint’s mission is to help people understand and do more with their money. We want to get millions of American’s on track to meet their financial goals. You might imagine that it’s going to take some big innovations to deliver on that goal. We certainly do. That’s why we’ve planned and are executing on an aggressive process of innovation. During our product’s first, beta, year, we delivered seven major upgrades, including significant additions such as:

• Mortgages
• Student Loans and Auto Loans
• Investments
• Custom Categories

Mint.com came out of beta in October, 2008, but the best is still to come. We can’t wait to show you.